Selling the Lie

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. – Genesis 3:5 (ESV)

I suppose something Gagdad said the last few days got me on this track. Though I may have mentioned it in passing before, I don’t know that I’ve told the whole story. I was thinking about it while riding the tractor last evening. It is a cautionary tale.

We had this friend named David who called us one Saturday and invited us to his house the next morning for a sort of Bible study. We had met him, his wife, and their son at a church near where they lived. We had since moved across the Metroplex, so it was a good, long drive from our house north of Dallas to beyond the southwest corner of Fort Worth. David was pretty adamant, though, that he wanted us to meet a man who had become, as he said on the phone, “a spiritual father” to them. We arrived the next morning at the appointed hour and took our seats in the very small living room of their house. In a few minutes, two men entered. One was average size. The other man was above average height and extremely obese, but quite well-groomed and well-dressed in upscale casual clothes that managed to fit him despite his enormous girth. The men sat down opposite my wife and I.

With no prayer or preliminaries, the fat man began to speak. He was articulate. There was an air of intelligence about him, but nothing he said was very deep or penetrating. Within a couple of minutes I realized what he was saying and what he probably was. Glancing at my wife I saw that she was puzzled and confused. She had not been able to follow the fat man’s rhetoric.

Honestly, if the man had come up to me on the street with such ridiculous banter I would have laughed in his face or called the cops to pick him up before he got himself in trouble. But I wasn’t on the street. I was an invited guest in the home of a good friend who was buying into the fat man’s story. Somewhere along the way, the fat man had picked up quite a bit of Christian, evangelical jargon. He may have even been a sincere believer at one time or another. Perhaps the truth he heard was twisted by his mind. Perhaps he saw an opening, a way to be “as God”, to draw love and attention, even devotion to himself.

The fat man had a day job. Care to guess what it was? If you guessed car salesman, you are correct. Every car salesman – any good salesman, really, knows all too well that the world is just overflowing with sad, hungry, vulnerable people who will buy whatever a person is selling to make themselves feel loved and accepted and important. Though the fat man was making an outrageous claim about himself, he wasn’t really selling himself.

My friend, David, was an engineer as well as being a licensed minister. His wife had a degree in music and was an accomplished classical pianist. Their son was a near-genius young man who was entering a prestigious university early, with academic scholarships. These were not stupid people. Nor were they people unfamiliar with the Bible. David had been preaching and teaching for a number of years as had his wife. If the fat man had simply made his claim like a madman, they would have rejected it as the utter madness it was.

Instead the fat man had told them that they were chosen to be part of his inner circle. He said, yes, I am God the Father (it makes me shudder just to write that), but you are the foundation of this new revelation. The fat man did what every successful cult leader does. He sold them an inside line, a valuable connection, status, and position. We look at someone like this or Jim Jones or Father Divine, even the lesser offenders like Robert Tilton or Benny Hinn (by the way, David and his wife were, prior to this, financial “partners” of Hinn’s ministry and had reserved seating at his events), and we wonder how people can be fooled by such blatant falsehoods. The trick is not what we believe about the salesman, but what we believe about ourselves.

David told me after this, when he was involved in a movement almost equally ludicrous, that he had always felt that he was destined to be someone great, to be world famous and renowned. That was about the last conversation I had with him. Some people just won’t learn.

Why was I not drawn in? Part of the credit undoubtedly goes to my wife. If she had been more sympathetic to the fat man, it would have been harder for me to do the right thing. Adam’s love for Eve was a critical part of his decision to reject the truth. Another part is my sense of humor which helps keep things in perspective. I do not take myself too seriously. That was the main difference between David and me. Credit for that goes to my parents. And one more thing -- the temptation wasn’t really aimed at me.

Very little credit goes to my native skepticism. Skepticism has no truth in it. As a defense against deception, it is more like barbed wire than a wall. It slows things down, but it will not hold up against serious bombardment. People who are merely skeptical are almost as easy to fool as those who will believe anything.

In the end, David’s wife decided to become the wife of the fat man. At that point, David had a sudden flash of insight -- too late. Their lives were torn apart and shattered. Their son was thrown into confusion and destruction. The fat man gathered a few more followers. I don’t know what happened to him, or my friend’s wife. Perhaps the fat man had a heart attack and died before he could really get going. Or, perhaps, he is still out there somewhere, deceiving and being deceived.

I mentioned that the fat man didn’t really target me with his temptation. I am vulnerable to other deceptions than the one that destroyed my friend. Mine run more along the lines of the material. I have no room to sit in judgment on another’s weakness. I simply point out that there are spiritual temptations that ensnare spiritual people. Just because someone is advanced in the spiritual realm does not mean he or she is in the clear.

Before I close an overly long post, I will add that there wasn’t much I could do to confront the problem. I tried when we went to lunch with David and his wife after the fat man and his associate left. I voiced my doubts and pointed out some of the contradictions, but they were already intoxicated by the prospects of being part of a new work of God, elevated to the status of the Twelve Disciples of Christ. When the break came between David and his wife, we once again made the long drive down. This time, I spoke very plainly about what was taking place. It made no difference to the wife or to the additional followers who surrounded the fat man. They responded by saying that I did not understand, that I was rejecting the new revelation as the Pharisees had rejected Christ. They proved to me that ultimately we deceive ourselves.